Her song flowed forth, and the clearing formed, lit brightly by the star shining overhead… for only a moment, before flames overtook it. The howls of hunting beasts drowned out the songbird's soliloquy. The haughty tree splintered, under the incidental impact of a charging beast, not even aiming for the scene but attacking another beast on the other side. For a moment, chaos threatened to engulf the scene she had so painstakingly woven.
She felt more than heard Sixiang's gentle encouragement in her thoughts, and put more into her melody. The Star blazed, and where it touched, fires went out, and beasts shied away, blinded and confused by its light. Once again, she heard the songbird sing. Yet it wasn't over, something massive passed overhead, beyond her reckoning in scale, and the clearing was destroyed, crushed beneath a massive hoof.
Ling Qi played on, and a green stalk shot up from the stump of the tree, and the songbird sang and gathered treasures anew. Shadows swallowed the star, only for its light to be reborn from its last glimmers. Again and again, random destruction and the uncaring whims of the mighty brought ruin, time flying by in a blur of decades and centuries.
Yet, the strumming bass of the lute could not drown out the notes of her flute. The blur of time began to slow. The clearing bloomed with new life and trees grew anew. The songbird sang and the star shone. All around, there was life. Under the stars light generations of the least of beasts lived peaceful lives, not without strife, but with certainty, and the songbirds nest shone with many treasures indeed.
Then it ended again, fire and blood shattering peace, and Ling Qi mentally gritted her teeth in frustration at the other girls inability to see what she was getting at. It felt like trying to shift a mountain with her bare hands, but she forced their shared scene to slow still more, weaving the music with every scrap of skill that Zeqing had taught her to make her own chords more dominant and drag things to her own tempo.
The songbird laughed and sang her many friends gathered in her shining nest. A family of mice lived and burrowed happily beneath the fields, days passing with the lazy certainty that came only from great plenty. A dozen, a thousand, a million other little scenes in the now, in the present, built on the stability that banished the snarling shadow that was fear.
In time it ended, and Ling Qi did not contest her opponent during the end, but rather the notes she picked out asked the question. Why?
Even if peaceful times would end, and fear would return, there was value in striving for those happy days. More value than in obsessing over inevitable ends, the chaos that had come and would come again. Gather your treasures, hold them dear, even if in the end they would be scattered again. Seek stability, because it is the foundation of defeating fear. Live for the moment in which you are happy, rather than fearing the future in which it ends.